Perch @perchingpath@eldritch.cafe

Refuge in flowers and fake leather, refuge in claws and blood, refuge in cider and garlic, refuge in snowstorms and cold water.

It's so hard for me to find pain in my body. Everything hurts somewhere else than where it is.

When I changed my name from something deep blue to something deep red, I began wearing navy more often & using less burgundy on my nails. I didn't notice that as a balance I'd been maintaining until just now.

I wed the tycoon mayfly, and upon receiving his modest bequest am finally able to support my lover, a sweet-voiced cicada, in the manner which he deserves. But wait! Tragedy lies in our future.

My effortlessly swallowing 100mg of spiro, 180mg of fexofenadine, 600mg of calcium, & a couple more smaller pills in one go demonstrates that I am a creature adapted to my milieu despite all indications to the contrary, and that's why you must spare me in the next cull season.

A drunk boy in Old City tipped his oversize comedy sombrero at me gravely, as if we were parting after the funeral of an eccentric-willed relative.

No one told me about my great-grandfather's boyfriends until about a decade after the first time I came out. One can, in so many contexts, be the latest in a dotted line of people forced to be unprecedented.

This morning has been sensorially brutal but now I'm pressing my face into this foil-wrapped burrito to let its warmth seep into my clammy cheeks.

Again I've shrunk precipitously & immediately reached for fruit. It was dense & overripe, a fructivore's approximation of a beef heart.

siphon-beaked harrier, billet-picker, archtern, clayshawk, orchidian hen, birch-bark picker, Jacob's aviary gem, hundred-feather, shawm's-breath, august warbler, ruche, red ticker, bring-berry, pillowsmete, plains snip, Lamont shank, chalky screech, Marianas dipper, perch-anchor

The world is full of textures bound to objects numerous, distant, large, dangerous, or, most often, ephemeral enough to prevent me from licking them, or even grazing them with my fingertips. I want silicone bracelets embossed with a selection of patterns formed by the mouches in my eyes.

Expressing myself to you honestly by standing in a dim far corner, my gaping mouth emitting a discomfiting sequence of steady tones.

Your thoughts run through the walls in a constant torrent, feathers or sand or whatever, eroding the insulation slowly and getting louder in the narrow rapids between doors & windows. Rushing upwards under your stair-steps to play with your vertigo.

The ruddy, spindly old man conducting your interview leans forward with his elbows on the desk & says, "One final question, ma'am: How much do you, mmm, identify with BloodHorse? Just take that question however it strikes you. Scale of 1 to 5, please. This is important."

Mustering my chirpiest voice to pipe, "I'm made of lead! My bones will fall through the water as through thin air & thump against the seabed!"

"Billiards! Bollards! Hyacinth, bawl & dirge, lice, craw feet, convolution! Prosopagnosist! Fastness, temulance, affixion & armistice! Divisionist, desistor, glossotomic foxglove!" is the sort of thing I'd say if I were Capitaine Haddock & had been deceived into a pratfall.

Irritating to find that a story I care about has a fandom, and I could thus at any time stumble across skilled illustrations in which the characters, whom I imagine to mostly be various strains of haggard wreck as befits their circumstances, are all thin, young, & cute.

My aunt's on bandcamp now. Her page has a gothy, primitive-digital aesthetic, enough to make me wonder if she'd gone industrial, but her latest single is still new-agey waiting room jazz. Great move.

Starting in 1960 my grandfather worked for an amusement park called Freedomland, whose Midwest-themed section contained a microcosm of the 1871 Great Chicago Fire, continually igniting and being doused. That's a gap of 89 years, so some visitors could have watched the pantomime while remembering the actual fire, which killed about 300.